Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Britain has always been an attractive place. Since time began, at least for Homo Sapiens, people have always moved from one place to another, and lots of them travelled to our fair edge of the European continent. I don’t know why, given our weather.
After the last Ice Age, about 9,000 years ago, the water level rose and the hills between what is now Dover and the coast of France formed a natural dam, holding back all that melted ice in the North Sea. When the dam was breached, all that water rushed down what is now the English Channel to meet the North Atlantic Ocean. It must have been quite a sight. And more or less at the same time the Isle of Wight was cut off by the rising sea level.
William was a Viking
Even the English Channel didn’t stop people arriving on our shores. Nobody knows the origins of the English, if such a thing were possible to gauge, but it seems that people were constantly trickling across the sea, from all over the place.
The Romans, who are the first group we know about in any detail, were mostly conscripts and businessmen from all over the Roman Empire. Very few of them would have been from Rome itself, let alone modern Italy. Then the Vikings, the Danes, the Angles, the Saxons, and William the Conqueror, who was actually a Viking, from a group of Vikings who conquered northern Normandy and settled there, intermarrying with the locals.
These things made us rich
After that we weren’t conquered again, although there was the occasional coup to replace kings. Britain became a relatively peaceful place, trading by sea and still attracting refugees and economic migrants from everywhere in the world. And these things made us rich.
Next year two more countries become full members of the European Union, Bulgaria and Romania. I can already hear the cries that we’ll be swamped by unwashed criminal unemployable types with huge numbers of babies infesting our shores and taking our resources, our housing and our jobs. I particularly enjoy UKIP’s claim that 27 million of them will descend upon us, even though that’s more than the total population of those countries.
The much healthier German economy
At the same time there are people who defend the idea of free movement of people seeking work and it’s discriminatory to turn people away by reason of their race or nationality or lack of skills or likelihood of seeking benefits within three months. And there are those who claim that hardly any will come to England, because they’re more likely to be attracted to the much healthier German economy.
The truth is that we don’t know how many will come in. We already have no idea how many legal or illegal migrants live amongst us, we tried to seal our borders and still managed to make a total mess of that. Once the doors are opened to Romanians and Bulgarians all this shouting will continue.
Armacommen In!
I remember the Poles. Armageddon was prophesied for our country and our economy and our crime statistics. There have been numerous hateful headlines blaming the Poles for every kind of terrible act and effect under the sun, and newspapers have thrived on that.
But where are all these headlines now? The Poles have gone home, or settled here. They have worked hard, done many of the jobs we don’t want to do any more, and introduced us to some interesting new kinds of food. The statistics are in, and it has been found by the National Audit Office that their arrival has resulted in a net benefit to the economy of some billions.
What have the Huguenots ever done for us?
I bet a few centuries ago that the same cry arose about letting in the Huguenots, or other groups of refugees, I do know there was shameful resistance to letting in Jewish people from Germany in the 1930s, and a lot of fuss was made about the Indian population of Uganda, expelled by Idi Amin. Does anyone remember that we had a huge number of Poles arriving during and after the Second World War? All these groups have arrived, often lived in slum poverty, worked hard, created jobs and businesses and benefited the culture and the coffers of the country.
OK. Among each of these groups were some murderers and criminals and some who exploited weaknesses in the benefit system, but by all accounts there is a smaller percentage of these among immigrant groups than among the indigenous population.
More related to the next election
Let’s face it, if your existence wherever you come from is so horrible that you’re prepared to risk your lives and hand over all your worldly possessions to dodgy criminals to get you to England, and if you survive the dangers and deprivations of your journey, then when you get here, wouldn’t you be grateful and willing to work hard to make the most of your new opportunities? I certainly would.
I vote that we see what happens on January 1st 2014. Let’s see how many South-Eastern Europeans actually arrive, and not listen to the howls of protest that are more related to the next election than any reality. Let’s be grown-up about it. It won’t be the end of the world. It’ll settle down.
The end of the world, of course, will come with the next wave of immigration.
Or maybe the one after that…
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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